Pinentry curses fallback for gpg

Ville Määttä mailing-lists at asatiifm.net
Thu Oct 16 22:23:01 CEST 2014


Hi John,

You could try the following environment variable:

export PINENTRY_USER_DATA="USE_CURSES=1”

If that’s no good maybe something in following thread helps:

http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2009-June/036583.html

-- 
Ville

On 16 Oct 2014, at 23:02, John Lane <gnupg at jelmail.com> wrote:

> Hello, I am trying to work out a few things with GnuPG that aren't clear
> to me after reading the available documentation. I hope it's ok to ask
> for some help?
> 
> Here's my first problem:
> 
> I cannot work our how to tell my desktop-less system to use the curses
> pinentry program. I can see that is is configurable for gpg-agent.conf
> but I see no equivalent for gpg.conf. The only way I have been able to
> do this is to re-point a symlink /usr/bin/pinentry to point to
> /usr/bin/pinentry-curses instead of /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk.
> 
> I have read the pinentry readme and see the configure options for it. I
> have cross checked with how the package is built for Arch Linux, which
> is the Linux distribution that I use. The configure options are
> 
> ./configure --prefix=/usr \
>        --enable-pinentry-curses \
>        --disable-pinentry-gtk \
>        --disable-pinentry-qt \
>        --enable-pinentry-gtk2 \
>        --enable-pinentry-qt4 \
>        --enable-fallback-curses
> 
> The installed binaries are like this:
> 
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     14 May  6  2013 /usr/bin/pinentry ->
> /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk2
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  48216 May  6  2013 /usr/bin/pinentry-curses
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 107384 May  6  2013 /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 153064 May  6  2013 /usr/bin/pinentry-qt4
> 
> It isn't possible to launch the gtk-2 or qt4 versions without the
> requisite libraries being installed, so both fail rather than fall back
> to the curses version:
> 
> # /usr/bin/pinentry-qt4
> /usr/bin/pinentry-qt4: error while loading shared libraries:
> libQtCore.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
> 
> # /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2
> /usr/bin/pinentry-gtk-2: error while loading shared libraries:
> libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
> directory
> 
> The curses version works fine. Now, as far as I understand, the gnupg
> binary uses the symlink "/usr/bin/pinentry" and, with the above
> configuration that means the gtk2 version. And, if the system doesn't
> have that installed then it fails.
> 
> I can obviously change the symlink to point to the curses version but,
> if I do, it'll eventually get reset by my distributions package manager.
> 
> As far as I can tell, it's the pinentry package's "make install" that
> creates this symlink rather than something distribution-specific.
> 
> So, what is the correct, approved way to get gpg to use the curses
> pinentry ?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Gnupg-users mailing list
> Gnupg-users at gnupg.org
> http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users

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